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Re: [lojban] Dr. James Cooke Brown
From: "Robert A. McIvor" <rmcivor@macsrule.com>
At 5:37 PM -0500 2/18/00, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
>Oops, I hit send too quickly. I had a
>
>At 03:41 PM 02/18/2000 -0500, Robert A. McIvor wrote:
>The posted grammar is Trial 80 from 1994.
Changes since then are minor. However, a newer grammar should be posted.
>
>The posted YACC grammar does not include the lexer/preparser, which
>contains (or hides) a substantial amount of grammar. As of the last
>version I had access to (and Trial 80's comments suggest that this is
>true), I could write any random string of LWs (cmavo), precede it by a word
>for a number and omit the space, and the entirety becomes a number
>compound. Likewise for a tense and probably some other compounds. In
>effect it means that there is no number or tense grammar since not all
>spaces are lexemic pauses. I understand that you RAM have tried to do some
>work on this problem, but it seems to be a large problem with unknowable
>side effects until the result is seen. More than half of the Lojban
>grammar is the YACC-encoded lexer grammar and the MEX grammar which in our
>case is no longer primarily a lexer construct, and a large percentage of
>our changes during the years before baselining involved the working out of
>bugs in that grammar.
It is true that the lexer has not been published. While it is a state
grammar, it has not been put into a formal format and it was hand derived.
Spaces are irrelevant to Loglan cmavo and, in fact, the lexer begins by
removing
all spaces between them. You would find the same behaviour if you had left
the spaces
in. The reason a number is concatenated with many other little words like
the PA (tense) lexeme, and the TAI (lettoral) lexeme as well as PO is that
such compounds are intentionally grammatical in Loglan. The grammar
concatenates any collection of cmavo that constitute
a single lexeme. It is true that we do not yet have a full MEX grammar.
>
>I think it is the undefinedness of the tense and MEX grammar and other
>compounds that most Lojbanists mean when they refer to the TLI Loglan
>grammar being incomplete.
>
Sincerely,
Robert A. McIvor
(rmcivor@mac.com)
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